{"id":2232,"date":"2010-01-26T18:22:30","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T18:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2010-01-26T18:23:30","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T18:23:30","slug":"obama_and_the_c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2232","title":{"rendered":"Obama And The Competence Gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greg Sargeant says something<\/a> that crystallized my thinking about the state of the Administration today.<\/p>\n

The question is whether Dem leaders will decide they’re tanking because voters don’t like the health reform bill they’ve been trying<\/b> to pass, making them decide to shelve it – or whether they’ll conclude that voters don’t like failure<\/b>, making them redouble their efforts to pass something they can call a historic accomplishment. Anyone taking bets?<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The issue from my POV is that what attracted many of us to Obama was the competence<\/b> that his campaign displayed. He was on message, unflappable, his campaign consultants weren’t eating their young on national TV and I think it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone – even those whose eyes cross with rage at his politics – believed he had a handle on things. So even if you disagreed somewhat with his politics or policies, you had comfort that the nation would be well-run.<\/p>\n

For me it was a combination of that and a belief that his core values (government should help the powerless and keep the powerful in check) were balanced by a novel perspective for a liberal (part of the problem is that government itself has become too powerful and needs to be kept in check).<\/p>\n

That’s what I read into the speeches and policy papers.<\/p>\n

The problem, as I see it, is that in his first year he’s shown very little domestic competence (I think foreign affairs are a separate matter), and that he either never believed in the “new^2 liberalism” or got completely stuffed by the interest groups and their Congressional sponsors.<\/p>\n

So the question is “now what?”<\/p>\n

In foreign policy, I think he’s done some things right, some things wrong; I think we’re drawing down in Iraq too soon, and I worry (a lot) about making Afghanistan the centerpiece of our battle against violent Islam worldwide.<\/p>\n

I think he’s taken the conciliatory road, bowing (literally, sometimes) to foreign leaders in the hopes that the anti-Bush rhetoric was right, and that the problem was just that we were mean.<\/p>\n

He’s discovering – and Hillary is voicing – that that’s not the case, and that we need to be more forceful in our speech and acts.<\/p>\n

That’s a really good thing, and exactly what I’d hoped for in supporting him – that he’d be conciliatory and either a) it would work; or b) it wouldn’t and then the commentariat and the non-shackled swing voters would follow him down either path.<\/p>\n

So now the question is – having been slapped internationally and pivoting toward a more assertive national role – what will he do having been slapped domestically?<\/p>\n

My hope, obviously, is for the Obama that I voted for and supported – one with liberal ends and novel means. That Obama can still be a terrific President – even a terrific two-term President.<\/p>\n

The Obama we’ve seen so far – the one opening the interest-group buffet – won’t be.
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is Obama competent enough?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}